The Open Side Richie McCaw (with Greg McGee) Hodder Moa, $50.00, ISBN 9781869712761 Valerie: The Autobiography Valerie Adams (with Phil Gifford) Hodder Moa, $50.00, ISBN 9781869712624 Let’s start with the numbers, all big. The initial 60,000 print run of Richie…
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Jane Stafford and Mark Williams (eds) Auckland University Press, $75.00, ISBN 9781869405892 I have a conflict of interest here: I am one of those writers with a substantial body of published…
The Raupo Dictionary of Modern Maori P M Ryan Raupo, $60.00, ISBN 9780143567899 Every household and office in Aotearoa New Zealand will have times when they need an easy-to-use Maori dictionary. As more te reo words and phrases drift into…
The Christchurch Fiasco: The Insurance Aftershock and its Implications for New Zealand and Beyond Sarah Miles Dunmore Publishing, $38.00, ISBN 9781927212035 Given New Zealand’s reputation as The Shaky Isles, together with its accompanying history of deluges, hurricanes, landslips, tsunamis and…
Risk C K Stead MacLehose Press, $30.00, ISBN 9780857052230 C K Stead is a towering figure in New Zealand writing – a distinguished novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English of the University of Auckland. He has…
Convicts: New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past Matthew Wright Penguin, $40.00, ISBN 9780143567646 We New Zealanders have always been complacent, even smug, about our nation’s origins. Unlike our nearest, much bigger, neighbour, New Zealand was never a penal colony, having been…